For the last month or so, I’ve been working on a couple of different small projects. Here’s another one I started recently!

I went to a jam at London’s V&A museum about a week ago. The theme: make a game inspired by the exhibits.

One of my favourite recent games is Dark Souls, and this seemed like a good opportunity to make a small Dark Souls inspired thing. One of the many things I love about that game is how it tells you about its world – letting you slowly piece things together for yourself as you discover useful game items containing parts of its history, fragments of stories with crucial details omitted.

I thought I’d try making a sort of dungeon crawler that had the same approach to item lore, only, based on real life museum exhibits from the V&A. Items that implied details of history lost in time, mysteries never solved. Pretty straightforward for a two day jam, I figured! Anyway, I got sidetracked and made a cool combat engine thing instead.

Here’s a vine!

I’ve basically got this really simple Dark Souls meets JRPG meets Street Fighter inspired system going on. It’s all about blocking at the right time, attacking at the right time, while managing your health, stamina and status effects. Nothing too complex, but it’s frantic and fun! I ripped the cutscene code out of my Experiment 12 game to make the battle animations, which are just clunky single frames that pan and shake.

So, here’s the thing. After the jam, I sat down and had another look at the game, and figured out some kind of bigger plan for what I want to make out of it. I wanna finish this up as a small, completely non-commercial thing and I’m just going to throw up online – and I’d like to do it soon, before the end of the year, preferably before Christmas.

It seems like it’s going to require a LOT of art assets, though. That one battle in the vine has three idle frames, three attack frames, a blocking frame, and it’s not even complete at that. And that’s just one enemy. I’m planning to have about eight of them! I’ll probably end up just doing palette swaps, but still.

So that’s a lot of work, and it’s not really work I’m that into doing – I’d much rather spend my time focused on the design, which itself has a bunch of scary time consuming challenges. So, I figured, why not team up with someone who actually enjoys drawing! You know, an artist!

I’m usually super reluctant to team up with artists, but I think it makes sense here, and it could be fun – I kinda love the idea of finding someone who brings something unexpected and cool to this universe.

So! If this sounds like something you’d be into and you’ve got some free time this month, drop me a mail, and we’ll talk more about it. (if you’re based in London, even better!)